


Person of Interest recap for 5x05 (ShotSeeker)

by fursasaida



Series: Person of Interest Recaps Lifeboat [11]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-05-31 18:27:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19431643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fursasaida/pseuds/fursasaida
Summary: I like this one! I feel very strongly that PoI has several ideas or thesis statements that really do inform the whole show and its storytelling, but because it's often subtle about them and because it was a CBS procedural, a lot of times they go unnoticed. So I feel good about the way I approached this episode (which has always been one of my favorite case-of-the-week eps).





	Person of Interest recap for 5x05 (ShotSeeker)

In 2002, Harold and the Machine played a game of Hide and Seek. One buzz to his phone for “yes, I see you”; two for “no, I can’t.” A year later they played another game: Hit or Stay? Harold was testing the Machine by having it help him cheat at blackjack (one for hit, two for stay), but the same vocabulary would allow her to save his life later that night. Two nights ago, Shaw and Samaritan played yet another game: Dead or Alive?

These games all have two things in common. Firstly, they’re all based on a binary, just as computer coding is: 0 or 1. Secondly, at this point in the show, they’re all really the same game. Seen or not is functionally the same as dead or alive, and has been since the end of Season 3. Last night, in “ShotSeeker,” the question is whether the choice between Hit or Stay is the same as Alive or Dead—or vice versa. Is it Hit or Stay that keeps you safe?

As is often the case on Person of Interest, the episode’s central question is exemplified by an argument between Harold and Root. Harold is all for Stay; Root, for Hit.

[LOST IMAGES: At this point I keep noting them out of spite and a vague feeling that it's still good to break up the wall of text.]

Ever since Harold’s great mistake—building the Machine and handing her over to the unscrupulous government—he has been a man of caution. He thinks, observes, and plans very carefully before taking any new steps. He tries to consider every angle and every possible consequence. While I was at first taken aback that he would treat Root with so little trust in his rather literal Machine vs. Samaritan cage match (who would have thought we’d ever see a Faraday Cage match on television), by the end of the episode it’s clear why he did it. Root is a variable he can’t control. It’s not that he thinks she would certainly do something regrettable with access to the simulations; it’s that he can’t be certain what she would do, and so he has to eliminate that variable to allow himself to run the test at all. So it is that Harold continues to advocate for keeping friends in the dark, for not ever being aggressive in strategy, and for letting the simulation run as long as possible without taking further steps, even as the simulated Machine loses over and over—10 billion to 0 and counting. Stay.

Root, on the other hand, thrives on chaos. (Like I said, a variable that can be neither controlled nor entirely predicted.) Her reformed, ethical, less-violent phase has never eliminated that from her personality. It’s part of what makes her so formidable, and has characterized her relationship with the Machine from the start: she wanted to set it free, to do what, she neither knew nor speculated—she just wanted to find out what that would be. When she and the Machine gained a bond, she happily did whatever the Machine told her without knowing why, taking joy in the excitement of finding out along the way. See and adapt, act and react, is how she works and an important part of what makes her powerful. So it is that she advocates for arming the Machine, for giving her the ability to “shove back” on the playground, and for taking more aggressive action. Hit.

Meanwhile, the Hit or Stay debate is taken up by three other characters: Fusco, the number of the week (whose name I could not find anywhere), and Carl “Invictus” Elias (Enrico Colantoni). (I’m making his middle name “Invictus” for the rest of eternity now.) Fusco has always known there was more going on than he understood, and for the most part he was okay with that; this season, he’s started pushing for more answers as everything around him gets weirder and weirder, but since he’s always been a grounded character, it’s threats to simple, human things he cares about that push him further this week: his son and his partner. Fusco is a fully redeemed, honest to goodness quality investigator who cares about helping people now, and when he feels his ability to protect and serve is compromised, he doesn’t hesitate. Over Finch’s objections, he runs straight at the threat, not even knowing what it is. Hit.

[LOST IMAGE: Fusco on the phone, saying "There's something going on right now, and I'm going to investigate it with or without the nerd herd."]

The number, on the other hand, is experiencing a crisis of conscience because, in his way, he’s always been passive. He works in an incident evaluation center for ShotSeeker, a surveillance capability that listens to the whole city for gunshots, and while he’s dispatched “a thousand cops to a thousand crime scenes,” he’s never cared. He’s never followed up. It’s the combination of a name he knows and fishy data that sends him out to do his own investigating. (One might note the similarity to Harold after Nathan’s death: a name he knows and fishy data.) He’s in the process of experimenting with Hit after a lifetime of Stay, and nearly dies for it; but still, in the end, he wishes he’d done more rather than stayed in his place. Hit.

Elias, finally, has always worked from a method that combines subterfuge, secrecy, and well-timed periods of passivity with unpredictable and aggressive strategic moves. In season 4, he pushed Harold for answers just as Fusco has been this season; Harold, ever the obscurantist librarian, gave him a copy of The Invisible Man. And as it turns out, that’s exactly what he’s become. An invalid in the team’s old safe house—guarded by the ever-solicitous Bear, who might want to look into getting a second certification in nursing—he’s been hiding all this time, so far as we know not planning a thing. (That may change.) Confronted with his old friend Bruce Moran (James Le Gros) in the same state of aggressive confusion motivating Fusco, Elias does exactly what Harold does to Fusco: he tells him to back down without telling him the full truth of why. “Go back to the shadows. Embrace them fully” is not only his advice to Moran, but also what he himself has done. Elias, once ever the optimist, always with another move, a back way out, has finally been convinced that the only thing to do is nothing. Stay.

In this sense, the episode works as something like the bevy of test scenarios Harold is running in the Faraday Cage with his toy ASIs. Confronted with the question of Hit or Stay, the characters come up with different answers and get quite different results for their trouble. Harold and Elias have been converted by their life experiences from Hit to Stay; Fusco and the number from Stay to Hit; and Root, ever consistent, remains pro-proactivity. These people have gotten varying answers to the question of whether Hit or Stay is more prudent over the course of the show, and the episode ultimately gives no final opinion.

[LOST IMAGE]

Instead, it offers another possibility altogether. Root and Harold’s disagreement over the Machine’s future is resolved (for the moment) when Harold points out that if anyone should modify the Machine’s nature, it should be the Machine herself. Breaking out of the binary games to something else entirely, the answer is neither Hit nor Stay but rather: if you don’t like the game, change the state of play. This is an intelligent solution (it’s exactly what the Machine did in “If – Then –Else” by adding Shaw as a variable) worthy of our human geniuses as well as an artificial super-intelligence. It’s also pleasingly sensitive to the Machine’s personhood and agency, and another step in Harold’s increasing appreciation for what—and who—the Machine really is. He reverted to calling her “she” again in this episode, and stated flatly that he trusts her. This is absolutely the right answer, and I am ravenously curious to know how the Machine might change herself, if she does.

I suspect that the endless losing simulations may serve as a test lab, a form of introspection, almost, that could determine what changes the Machine might choose to make. How would she feel about that? People often mourn how difficult circumstances change us; we may survive or even win, but at what cost? (Harold, after uploading Krupa Naik’s research online: “We saved a life today, but at what cost?”) What of ourselves do we lose? If the Machine changes herself to win against Samaritan, what will she give up, and will she mourn it or simply see it as a necessary upgrade? What will Harold think? What will Root? I hope to learn.

“ShotSeeker” refers, of course, to the Machine’s situation as well: she’s looking for her shot. As things stand, apparently it’s one in more than 10 billion. The episode ends with a return to ShotSeeker itself, showing that even as it officially scans for gunshots, Samaritan can use it to locate and recognize voiceprints. Its three antennae, creeping over the eye of the surveillance camera, are somehow more spine-chilling than any shot of Samaritan’s endless servers or even its interface has ever been. The ASIs on this show have always been described visually, as always _watching_ ; now they’re listening, too. What can really be done about that? And yet, what good can doing nothing do?

Final notes:

  * You guys, ShotSeeker is REAL. Please meet [ShotSpotter](http://www.shotspotter.com/) and, like me, despair of the future. They seem to be taking design cues from Samaritan: **[Ed. Note:** I had a screencap here of their website's homepage, which really did eerily resemble Samaritan's interface/POV. **]**
  * Poor Jeff Blackwell rides again. May he one day not be wholly tragic.
  * Will we ever learn what Samaritan was worried about in Krupa Naik’s work, do you suppose? Speaking of Krupa, I really appreciated that the number’s connection with her wasn’t past romance or something else melodramatic and saccharine. It’s as simple as the fact that he knew her once, and no one seemed to care. Everyone is relevant to someone, even in the smallest of ways.
  * And speaking of _that_ , am I the only one who thought Krupa and Mary (Julie Cavaliere) were maybe in love? Mary’s last words before being shot sure sounded like it to me.
  * Root may call John “helper monkey” when she knows he’s safe, but she was really worried for him. It warmed my friendship-loving heart.
  * Also heartwarming: John actually thanked Fusco and treated him like a human being. I sorely hope this represents a trajectory for the rest of the season that will not be reversed again, as has happened so many times.
  * I screamed so loud when Elias’s bald head hove into view, one of my housemates yelled from upstairs to see if I was okay.



**Author's Note:**

> I like this one! I feel very strongly that PoI has several ideas or thesis statements that really do inform the whole show and its storytelling, but because it's often subtle about them and because it was a CBS procedural, a lot of times they go unnoticed. So I feel good about the way I approached this episode (which has always been one of my favorite case-of-the-week eps).


End file.
